SOURCE: Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa. “The Book of Good Love: Content, Genre, Purpose.” In Two Spanish Masterpieces: The Book of Good Love and The Celestina, pp. 18-33. Urbana, Ill.: The University of Illinois Press, 1961.

In the following essay, Lida de Malkiel discusses why Ruiz chose to write in the form of fictitious autobiography, concluding that he did so as a means of promoting his views on moral conduct.

The great Spanish poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though vigorously original, have their counterparts in other European literatures: the Spanish Lay of the Cid is comparable, for example, to the Song of Roland, the Spanish Book of Alexander to the German epics about the same hero. But the Book of Good Love has no pendant in any other literature of Western Europe. This fact has in no small way detracted from its appreciation, because the concepts...