The Spanish poet Juan Ruiz (ca. 1283-ca. 1350), the archpriest of Hita, was the author of the "Libro de buen amor," one of the most extraordinary poetic creations of the Middle Ages.

Practically nothing is known of the life of Juan Ruiz except for what can be reconstructed from his poem. However, since the history of literature repeatedly proves that such a biographical technique is dangerous, it is best to carefully weigh all such evidence. In his poem he says that he was born in Alcalá de Henares (V: 1,510), a fact that agrees with the knowledge of geography shown in the poem. He gives an alleged self-portrait in stanzas 1,485-1,489, but scholars have pointed out that before these lines can be accepted as a physical picture of Ruiz, the weight of rhetorical tradition in literary portraiture--the physical correlates that medieval medical sciences attributed to psychological characteristics--and the fact...